I keep a rough mental list, the kind you don’t write down but carry around anyway, of the stretches over nine years where I genuinely came close to stopping running altogether. There are more of them than I’d have guessed if you’d asked me a decade ago, back when I assumed sticking with something for years meant a fairly steady commitment the whole way through. It hasn’t been steady. It’s been more like a handful of separate seasons where I nearly let it go, each for a different reason.
The injury year, briefly
The most obvious one is the year I couldn’t run at all because of an injury, a story I’ve told in more depth elsewhere on the site, so I won’t repeat all of it here. What’s worth saying in this context is that the injury itself wasn’t actually the closest I came to quitting. The closer call came later, when I was cleared to run again and had to decide whether I actually wanted to start over from close to nothing. Stopping had become the default. Restarting required an actual choice, and for a while I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.
The season it just got too busy
A separate, less dramatic stretch happened a couple of years before the injury, during a period where work and life outside running had gotten genuinely overwhelming. Running didn’t get taken from me by anything physical. I just stopped prioritizing it, week after week, until months had gone by and I realized I hadn’t run in longer than I wanted to admit. I remember telling myself I’d get back to it once things calmed down, and things never really calm down on their own schedule. What actually got me back running was deciding to go, not waiting for space to magically open up.
The season it felt pointless
There was another stretch, harder to explain because nothing external caused it, where running just stopped feeling like it meant anything. I was still physically capable, nothing was going on in the rest of my life that explained it, I just lost the thread of why I was doing this at all. Runs felt like an obligation with no clear payoff. I kept going through the motions for a while out of habit more than desire, and there were a few weeks in there where I seriously considered just letting the habit die instead of forcing myself through runs I wasn’t getting anything out of.
What actually pulled me back each time
Looking at these seasons together, I don’t see one consistent thing that saved running each time. After the busy stretch, it was mostly just deciding to go one Saturday and being surprised how good it felt to be back out there. After the pointless stretch, it was honestly the club, showing up because people expected me on a Sunday, even when I didn’t particularly want to be there myself. After the injury, it took longer and was more deliberate, closer to a decision I had to keep remaking on hard days than a single moment that fixed things.
What I got wrong about my own commitment
For a long time I assumed that someone who’d been running for years must have a kind of settled, permanent relationship with it, immune to the doubts that hit people earlier on. That was never true for me. I’ve had seasons well into my running life where I was as close to quitting as I was in my first year, just for more complicated reasons. I think admitting that plainly matters more than pretending nine years in means the question is settled.
Where that leaves me now
I don’t assume anymore that the current stretch, whatever it looks like, is the final, stable version of my relationship with running. I expect there will be more seasons like the ones above, stretches where it gets hard to justify showing up, for reasons physical or otherwise. What’s changed isn’t that I’ve become immune to those seasons. It’s that I recognize them faster now, and I’ve stopped being surprised or ashamed when one shows up again.
What I got wrong the first few times
In earlier seasons, I treated each close call as a unique crisis, something specific to that particular stretch of life that needed its own explanation and its own fix. That made each one feel heavier than it probably needed to be, because I wasn’t recognizing the pattern underneath them. It took several of these seasons stacking up before I understood that the specifics change but the shape is fairly similar each time: motivation fades, showing up gets harder, and eventually either something small pulls me back or the gap widens until running quietly falls away for a while.
How I check in with myself now
These days, when a stretch starts feeling like the beginning of one of these seasons, I try to notice it earlier rather than waiting until I’m fully out of the habit. I ask myself honestly whether I’m dreading the run itself or just dreading something else in my life that running has become tangled up with. That question doesn’t always have a clean answer, but asking it earlier has helped me catch a couple of near misses before they turned into full seasons away from running altogether, even if I’m sure there will be another season, sooner or later, that catches me off guard anyway.